Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine

This was a challenging but really engrossing and utterly fascinating book on the philosophy of time and the “production of time” within capitalism. Here, the author describes how the transcendental subjectivation of time is necessarily tied up with the development of capitalism and the modern world, that the invention of the precision mechanical clock revolutionized not only industry, but likely made Kant's conceptualization of time possible in the first place. And from there, the further mutation of our understanding of time is also mediated by technology and capitalism, with Greenspan bringing in the Deleuzean understanding of Aeon and Chronos to discuss the Y2K bug as an Aeonic mutation point signifying an evolution of globally standardized clock-time to a post-global, increasingly decentralized, fully machinic “cyberspace time.”

The introduction from the Miskatonic Virtual University team expands this last point even further, showing how the appearance of Bitcoin's decentralized use of timestamp server networks is proof that cyberspace has mutated the production of time, including the fact that the timestamped blockchain acts as a kind of “timechain,” a purely quantified calendar of sequentially numbered blocks, whose ebbs and flows are determined by a difficulty-adjustment algorithm and totally divorced from cosmic motion and cultural seasonality. Instead, the intensity of mining operations on the bitcoin network is the primary variable for the algorithm: economic activity is the very pulse of the cybernetic calendar (time = money). If you are able to read the whole book without your mind getting blown even once, I'd suggest you didn't understand the contents.